Friday, June 10, 2016

Esfahan, the most beautiful city of Iran

As far as we can judge this is a true
statement. Contrary to other places where we have been this city has many tree-lined and thus shaded avenues, which makes strolling
around a lot more agreeable. Then there are many sites to be seen,
such as the main square, palaces, mosques, parks, musea, even of
contemporary art, and the latter we consider very special in this
religion-dominated and traditional country.

There's also a river
running through the city, hundreds of meters wide and now completely
dry. To the citizens' regret, as they told us, just a couple of days
ago they dammed the river upstream in order to secure the water
supply in these dry times. The river is crossed by several bridges,
among which some very old and beautiful ones, especially the one with
the 38 arches.

As we have not many days of cycling
ahead of us we stayed here for 5 days, spending our time with leasure
visits to the sites and reading.

Ramazan (z instead of d) makes it a bit
more complicated. Only in the big hotels you can have food and drinks
during the day, the rest is closed. But, as a matter of fact, we are
surprised that there are so few cafés and restaurants here, you have
to search for them with a candle. Strange in such a touristic place.

Then a general remark about the traffic: Though we have never found ourselves in danger yet, the way the
Iranians drive their cars is next to lunatic. There seem to be not
many traffic rules to adhere to. They just cut you short, block your
path, park in the middle of the streets, open car doors or drive away
without checking their mirrors, make u-turns on busy streets, ignore
red lights and so on. For us Iranian traffic is the worst that we
ever experienced. They themselves don't bother and they simply remain
the most friendly people on earth that we ever experienced.